sungreeter and such

Hey,

I made some progress with processing:

This is my first self-designed and self-written piece of processing based on objects. It is one object that is copied a certain number of times that takes its colour from the X and Y position of the screen and from the X coordinate of the mouse. So move your mouse to see some change.

After showing it to friends I showed how easy it is to change something like this and I made this piece:

ain't that nice? :)

Anyway, In my stupid efforts to make a good sungreeter I came up with this thing:

I now have a new motor which uses 5V (so no Relay anymore :) ) which uses a elastic band to turn an old photo-film-case. In which something needs to be put in order to make some sound. The problem I'm having, still, is that the motors work to fast. And I don't really have good ideas how to slow these down, but I hope that with this set up I can slow it down a bit. And later maybe even better... lets hope :).

so that was it for now!

cheers!

frank

Sungreeter experiment

Ok,.. so...

I tested the sungreeter in the setup inspired by Zimoun. But... it scared the hell out of me. around 5:50 in the morning hell broke loose as the little string started to hit my desk, which was actually the plan. But during the day it didn't make a lot of sound. But now in the morning it made a hell of a noise! So I stopped it.

i started to reconsider.. what else can it do? I started to make plans of attaching a fan that would blow onto a windchime in order to make it make some delicate sounds. But the problem was that I don't have a fan which i could use. But I liked the plan so I started to work.

First I needed some sound generators, for the 'clings' and 'clangs'. On my room I found some empty (washed :)) beer bottles and I attached some string to them.

Then I hung them up so they almost touched each other and my desk:

And I put the motor to it so I would have a sort of fan but less windy... more a ringer or something...

And the result last night was mostly the same. Lots of noise and no pleasant waking. Also this time it started to work at 5:45, which was earlier! ah well..

So now the plan is to create more something like a wind chime and make the middle part, that touches the sound generators, move. Hopefully this will make a calmer sound which will be more relaxing :).

ok, that was it. for now.

hopefully next Time i'll have something more like a windchime.... ish thing...

cheers,

frank

new stuff

hey,... it's been a while...

I'm finding that when you have holidays but don't know when they are going to stop, or when you need to begin again, you don't really have holidays. which is quite annoying and is actually making me a bit anxious. At the moment I'm searching for a graduation project to finish my master Design for Interaction. And it feels that I have to put all my time into this, as long as I don't have project yet. So no spare time for other things, which is quite stupid, I think, but the uncertainty is kind of killing me i guess...

Anyway for this blog it kind of means that I try to do things, but they aren't spare time anymore, it's just a planned activity... of sorts.. maybe it isn't but it is hard to start on it without feeling bad about it.

But enough talk and more images! yay!

These are two characters I made for my girlfriends birthday. The idea was that the blue character is a bit slow but strong and cheerful and that the yellowish one is sort of the brain and is actually steering the blue one. And together they travel around the world in search of adventures, or something, maybe a bit inspired by this:

This was a good exercise of trying to prototype something as I first needed to make some to figure out how to fold this and how to assembly them. the first folding one was pretty boxy (ok i know i still need to post a picture) and this one has all sorts of angles that I had to figure out, and still it didn't really end up perfect. But :) here is another picture of the two rascals :) :

To take better care of my plants i decided they need an automated watering system. So this is what I made: a Belgian beer bottle (filled with water (since the beer had magically disappeared)) with a string in it to transfer the water to the plant. And it actually works fine! the only problem is that it uses its water to fast so it will only last one day... but when I'm away for a weekend it is good :)

Lately I've been watching this video of Zimoun:

The DC motors with some sort of string attached reminded me of my old sun greeter. So I though it might be cool to rebuild it, in a new way, to resemble these DC motors of Zimoun.

So now it is just a bit strange that it is hold down with some blue tape, but it holds it quite well. It still just operates on a light sensor together with Arduino and a relay to switch 3V to the motor.

So this week i'm going to make it work and hopefully see if it works good. But I think the conclusion is going to be that it will make to much sound. Maybe I should do something with the speaker... ah well we will see :)

Another thing i've been working on is processing, I've continued a bit with the tutorials and now I learned the Object oriented programming. Not that I'm good at it, but I think I understand it. So now I will try to make some different sketches with it :). here is a screenshot :) :

So that was it, next week hopefully more of the folding beasts and animals :), about the sungreeter and Processing.

bye!

New site, new look

Hey, fancy eh?

Yupp, that's right.. Monk-eh is now completely changed! Well,... not completely, but considerably.

The thing is: now that I finished my internship, I need a portfolio to find a graduation project. And when I looked at what I had until now, it was a bit,.. mew.... not that exiting. So with my new found skills I pushed the graphics a bit, and made the most of what I already had. So it is more a 'restyling' (mew-word) than a redesign.

So now every picture has a shadow and the blocks have rounded corners. I changed the proportions of the pictures a bit, so the dimensions of everything make more sense. And I added the FancyZoom zoom function:

It looks rather nicely aye?

but... As always. not everything is as awesome as it seems. In Operah everything looks great, in Firefox the rounded corners are gone so it looks a bit worse and Internet Explorer just ignores everything and scares all the pretty shadows and rounded corners away. Mean Internet Explorer! (Damn Bully).

But at the moment it works on all browsers, which is most important, and maybe later, when I'm more experienced in coding websites (when ever.) I'll build a better one that is the same on all browsers! ha! :)

My brother visited my in Delft and I showed him my Arduino projects and awesome programming skills. And he decided to give me a book about how to program in Java. Which is quite handy since processing also works on Java. So this is probably good to know the basics. He also gave me his old Mulitmeter, which will be amazingly handy trying to understand all the components that come with the arduino! ha! :)

Ah well, hopefully my website will be up tomorrow or the day after tomorrow (probably the day after tomorrow ;) ). I'll let you know :)

see you around! :D

bye,

Frank

Lots to say

Hi there!

My last two weeks have been pretty eventful which left me little time to do anything about this blog or experiments with Arduino. More specifically, it didn't leave me any time. But stuff happened.

First of all my internship at Studio Sophisti has ended. It it's kind of sad because I did a lot of cool stuff there and the guys that work there are also cool. But hey, like they say: all good things come to an end. And this one didn't end to badly :). The last week was filled with completing and finalizing a new product. And I as a gift I got an HD recorder:

:D

Already my digital SLR and HD Recorder are good friends. I've already made tons of movies, which make absolutely no sense or are complete crap, but it is nice to figure it out and see what works good. And it is also good for me to make presentation video for products and, of course, for this blog it might also be a good thing :).

Besides this I had some sort of revelation, thinking about how new technologies take interacting with interfaces to a new level. (Kinect, multitouch and other things.) It made me wonder if all buttons are going to disappear. And if so, will this be regrettable? I mean, every product that we use during the day has a button of some sort which activates some sort of activity. it's amazing how many buttons there have been made and how many design principles are connected to them. There are probably tons of philosophies talking about buttons!

It made me think that I want to write an essay about it :). I've got no clue where it might go, but I think it will be interesting :).

Talking about buttons: I was thinking there are one-button-games like canabalt. There is even an MMO one-button-game! Maybe there should be one button products!, there probably are already a lot of them, coffee-machine (the filter ones) (I can't think of others...maybe a water boiler, OH!!!! and lights! :D ). And I thought it might be cool to think what you can do with just one button. How complex can you make something?

I'm curious as well as exited about this :). we'll see where this is going. But it is nice to have some new ideas to work on. (even though I still have a lot to still work out!)

any way,

hopefully until a few days!

frank